The Benefits of Napping at Work

The Benefits of Napping at Work We all know the feeling of waking up for work and just not wanting to get out of bed. Either a late night, a heavy schedule or even the thought of leaving the warmth of the duvet, are just some of the  reasons why getting out of bed for work sucks. But sometimes even when you get to work, you can’t take your mind off returning to bed  and this is why you need to find a great opportunity to take a nap at work. Why nap at work? OK, so I understand that napping at work sounds pretty risky, but doing it is so much fun! It gives you the chance to take a little time, get back in the zone and recharge your batteries. I’m not talking about taking a 2 hour nap but a great 20-30 minute stretch can do you wonders, so why not give it a shot? What are the benefits of napping at work? Improve productivity: If you’re getting a little tired, or your legs are starting to drag a little, taking a nice nap to refocus your energy is the best way to improve your results for the rest of the day. According to NASA scientists you just need to nap for 26 minutes. Its a great amount of time to sleep during lunch, or leave the desk without catching anyone’s attention  and you’ll return to your job feeling ship-shaped and ready to tackle the afternoon with a newfound determination. Helping your mental health:  Working can be very draining, and while most of us have got to do it, this doesn’t make it any easier at all. The stress of your job can easily get you down, and if you’re not sleeping great at home, then it can affect your work too.  You need to be in the right mental state to conduct your job properly, so in order to try and regain a little control, it’s worth turning to the land of nod to get some well-earned rest. When can I nap at work? While big meetings are going on: I know this sounds very risky, but I don’t mean while you’re in a big meeting, I just mean while they’re going on around you! If you’re in a smaller office this works perfectly. Everyone goes off for an hour meeting about this, or that, and only  a few friends or some admin workers are still around. While the big-wigs are in their meeting, you can get a little shut-eye in one of the smaller rooms. If your office/workspace has a gym or a TV room, or your car is close by, these are perfect places to hide away and nap at work. During your lunch break: This is your time so do with it what you please. You’re most likely to have at least half an hour, maybe even an hour, so make sure you use that time well and nap if you want to. But just remember to set an alarm! When the boss is away: A great time to nap is when you know your boss is away for the day. Whether theyre on holiday, or during an external meeting, if you know they’re not in, you can catch some sleep for sure. What you don’t want to do, though, is make it look obvious. Some people in the office might well have their eye on you while your line manager is elsewhere. Be sure to be cute with your time and sleep under the radar. Home working: Working from home is the best way to nap on the job! If you’re allowed to work from the comfort of where you live, then you would be crazy not to slip a nap or two in, but just make sure you keep your phone on loud so that if you’re sleeping and your boss rings you, you can jump up and answer it like nothing was wrong. Is it easy to get away with? If you’re napping on a break, then go nuts! You’re allowed to do it then. But if you’re choosing another one of the ways above, you’ll need to be at least a little sneakier. If you’re smart and don’t get too cocky (anything over a 30-minute nap in work is just asking for trouble!) then you can easily get away with it. If you’re in a big office, then there’s too many people to notice you’re gone, and if you’re in a small office then people are usually too busy to notice you’re not there. Perfect! What if I get caught? Well that’s just hard luck. The chances of you getting caught sleeping in work are pretty slim, but it’s worth just being honest. It’s also worth knowing when you’re beaten. Telling the truth as to why you’re sleeping on the job might just be the best way to get out of that situation unscathed! If napping becomes a regular thing Genuinely, you shouldn’t find yourself napping every day. You shouldn’t really find yourself napping weekly at work, either. And if you find it tough making your way to the end of the day without a nap, it’s well worth chatting it over with your employer. Tips on napping at work Set an alarm and stick to it. You’re in work, so no pressing the snooze button. This is a sure enough sign you will sleep the day away! Be careful! Put your phone on the loud setting If someone from work needs to get hold of you, you need to be able to answer. You don’t really want them to know you’re sleeping, so leaving the phone to ring out will most likely result in them coming to hunt you down. Which is never good, especially if you’re asleep. Be tactical about it   Nap in the right place, at the right time, and tell the right people. A work friend is never going to rat you out, but they can also look out for suspicious eyes coming from across the room. Plan your nap carefully. Napping at work is an art form that is often practiced with great caution. But if you can get it right, you can genuinely improve your working life by redefining how you go about the rest of your day. About the author:  Frank Apodaca is the lead editor of The Sleep Judge. A website that provides honest reviews of a wide range of sleep products as well as information for those looking for a better nights sleep.

I dont know what I want to do University of Manchester Careers Blog

I dont know what I want to do University of Manchester Careers Blog Its probably the most common phrase we hear at the Careers Service, and something were more than happy to help you with, but The Big Careers Secret A careers adviser cant tell you which job you should do The idea of a careers adviser being able to pick out the right job for you harks back to the days of a limited number of clearly defined suitable roles for a graduate teacher, civil servant, doctor, lawyer, engineer, chemist. It also dates back to a time when students were prepared to follow a conventional career path, with the promise of a pension at the end of a long, predictable career. Now there are thousands of  niche or specialist jobs to choose from, but you dont expect to stay in one job or with one employer for very long. No-one can know about all those jobs, neither a careers adviser, nor you. So, how do you choose? If you havent had that lightbulb moment where your ideal career revealed itself to you, the temptation is to wait for inspiration, or think you cant do anything to progress your career. Id suggest that a better approach is to: Find a job which is a reasonable starting point it doesnt have to be perfect, just something youre going to learn from and youve got the basic requirements for. Learn from the experience what do you enjoy, what do you dislike? Pick up some skills and achievements along the way get some good material to add to your CV. Then, find another job which is closer to what you now know you want. The grand experiment Treat your career like a grand experiment, constantly testing out your theory of what you might want to do or might be good at, observe the outcome of any jobs you have a go at, refine the experiment and try again. I cant claim ownership of this grand experiment idea its included in a great blog post from Nathaniel Koloc in the Harvard Business Review called Build a Career Worth Having. However, it really resonated with me, probably because it matches my own meandering approach: Try a career, find out whats good/bad about it, step sideways into something else, and repeat until the lightbulb does suddenly go on. (I really did have that sudden revelation that everything was leading me to becoming a careers adviser but its a long story!) Start with what you know, and build on it One simple way to make a quick start is to create two lists What youDo want and Dont want in your career You dont have to add specific careers to your lists, although straight away, you can probably add lots of careers you dont fancy to your Dont want list. You could add ideas about work environment outdoors, office, lab skills used communicating, planning, creativity, teamworking location working conditions hours, pay purpose helping others, inventing new products or services, organising people, creating wealth and whatever else is important to you for your future life. Whenever you hear or read about a type of career (a post/graduate profile on the web, an employer or alumni presentation, talking to a family friend about the work they do), add to your lists, until you start to build up a real picture of what you want from a career. You still wont have a job title, but now when you see a job ad or read about a career, you can review your list and see if it matches more of your Do want list than your Dont want list. You can also judge whether youre prepared to compromise on the rest. This can give you more confidence that a job might be a good match for you. It can also avoid you getting lured into a career which sounds great or which impresses your friends, but which is frankly unsuited to what you really want out of life. Further support There are lots of other ways to sneak up on your ideal career. If you want to explore this in more detail, have a look at our other online resources: Getting started the general career planning section of our website How to explore postgraduate career options in person How to explore postgraduate career options online And, of course, you can always come and talk to a careers adviser. Well be very happy to help you find the right questions to ask yourself and others, can probably point you in the direction of resources which can help you but dont be disappointed if we cant guess the ideal career for you. All Postgrad-highlighted Postgraduate career planning Getting started

Redesigning a blog is about communicating with the designer

Redesigning a blog is about communicating with the designer When I was a new manager, one of the steepest learning curves I had was how to adapt my communication style for the various groups I interfaced with: Technical, creative, executive. Fortunately, I had learned from my days as an arbitrage clerk that each group of workers requires a specific type of communication, so I spent a lot of time listening carefully to how other people talked. So it makes sense that these tips on how to redesign a blog are really about how to communicate with a designer. Because good communication is essential to having a good experience doing a redesign. 1. Tell your designer you five most important things, in order. This is what you want to convey in your blog. This will help the designer make interface choices to help your audience focus on what you want them to see. For example, is your about me section really important? It is if you have a lot of expertise. Is your RSS information important? It is if you are aiming to build a large, loyal audience. Also tell your designer the message you want to get across about yourself are you friendly, authoritative, technical. This will help the designer figure out a look for your blog. The best way to get a design you love is to be really, really clear about what you want right here, at this stage. 2. Dont ask your designer to train your dog. Can your designer keep your dog from sleeping on your laptop? No. Of course your dog is not part of the designers job. Yet people dream up all sorts of non-design problems to toss over to the designer. Problems like a boring bio, or a bad topic, or terrible category names (I have this last problem) are not design problems. If you comments section never gets used, the designer cant fix that. Things are just going to be empty. And no designer can overcome the ugliness of a headline that is five lines long. Only you can rewrite incompetent headlines. Unless your blog is about design, design cannot compensate for lame content. 3. Dont reinvent the wheel. There are established conventions for blog design, and you need to have a totally incredible reason for bucking those conventions. For example, About Me is a heading and it goes on top. Just do that. Dont bother with being inventive. Its not worth it. Spend your energy being inventive with your content. People want to know how to navigate your stuff as soon as they get there. Ill learn a new navigation system to use Photoshop. Theres a lot of return on my time investment. Im not learning a new navigation system to get through a blog I dont even know if Ill like. And dont tell me that your radically new, reinvented blog interface is intuitive. Its not. Because I intuitively look for an interface that is similar to the 55 million other blogs 4. Keep your design opinions to yourself. Theres a reason you are not supporting yourself as a designer: You are not one. If you want to tell the designer what to design, then dont hire one. My point is, leave the designer alone. If you dont trust the designer to come up with something good on her own, then dont hire her. If you think the designer doesnt get it, then ask yourself if you have conveyed the information the designer needs. In short, a bad design is often your own fault: You either hired someone who cant design, or you gave bad information during point number one (above). In either case, you cannot solve this problem by becoming the designer yourself. You have to solve this problem by looking inside yourself to see where you went wrong. If you hired a bad designer, heres an article on how to hire a better one. 5. Talk about your expertise, not the designers. Instead of giving the designer instructions on how to do his job, tell him about your job. Note: This will be very difficult for people who have no idea what their goals are or how they are going to reach them. This is why good designers will not work with people who lack vision for themselves. Here are some examples: Bad: What about blue? I really like the color blue. Good: This design feels very edgy to me, but this blog should look like part of the establishment. Bad: Good blog designs usually have an email me button on the top. Good: My readers need to know how to contact me very easily, and I dont think theyll see the email me button where it is. 6. Know your own limitations. With trepidation over the amount of work entailed, I agreed to add photos to my blog. I like how they look. But it turns out that my stock photos are pretty lame. And after about twenty emails from people explaining this problem to me, I have learned a bit about photos. So, like every project, you do your best at the stuff youre best at, but theres always room to learn. My learning area is the photos. For now, I opt for high quality, but free stock photos from sites like Burst. One reader who complained about the stock photos is Annie. I asked her for suggestions on how to use photos differently and she sent some links. The links Annie sent showed me a different way to think about blogs. My favorite is HellomynameisHeather. Im annoyed that my new blog design has created a picture problem that I have to deal with, but its been a good opportunity to explore something new. And that, after all, is what blogging is all about.

On the Job by Anita Bruzzese Get Better Results by Taking Handwritten Notes

On the Job by Anita Bruzzese Get Better Results by Taking Handwritten Notes The next time you go to a meeting, you might want to consider leaving your iPad behind and instead taking along a pad and pen. Thats because a new study shows what many of us have suspected for some time: That were better able to retain and understand information if we write it longhand instead of using a laptop or other device to take notes. In three studies byPam A. MuellerandDaniel M. Oppenheimerrecently published inPsychological Science, it was found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. Mueller, a Princeton University doctoral candidate, says that one surprising aspect of the study was that even though someone can take more notes via a laptop, transcribing those notes verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning. In other words, you may write slower than you can type, but youre also listening, digesting and summarizing what you hear. This research may give bosses more ammunition when it comes to advocating that workers take notes by hand during a meeting to retain more (and to avoid the distraction of checking Facebook). It also may back up the complaint by managers that workers who dont write down instructions or other information are sure to forget it later or make an error in their thinking. Of course, toting along a pad and pen to a meeting also increases the chances that workers will begin doodling, which isnt possible while typing on a keyboard. While bosses (read more here)

Lead Synonym Resume - Write Your Own With a Template

Lead Synonym Resume - Write Your Own With a TemplateA Lead Synonym Resume is a great tool for writers looking to break into the world of marketing. It is not easy to get your foot in the door, but with a Synonym Resume you can jump right in and know that you are on the right track to success.As writers, we have all felt the frustration when trying to put together a quality lead synonym resume. The job market is not only competitive, but the prospect of receiving rejection is enough to drive anyone crazy. This leads to time consuming endeavors such as filling out 100 resumes a day in an effort to land the job that we love.It's okay to do that. I once did it and can tell you that after a while it got boring. I felt like I was just running the same old resume out there day after day with little or no change.I didn't give up and instead took my time finding the initial jobs I wanted. By spending time researching, I was able to get interviews only meant to find out if I had what it took t o be the next writer that they were looking for. These interviews were usually a breeze and made me feel that I had finally found my niche in the business. Those first few jobs left me feeling fresh and excited about what I could achieve as a writer.As a writer, I did not have to spend hours on end creating a Lead Synonym Resume. Using templates, I was able to quickly fill out one in a matter of minutes.Once I found my niche, I went through the job openings and used the lead synonym resume template. It was very easy to find the leads I needed and immediately began writing. After a few months I was able to write my own unique Lead Synonym Resume.Niches are everywhere, but getting them is the hardest part. If you are good at research, you should have no problem finding a qualified lead in a matter of seconds. There are many directories out there that have hundreds of thousands of leads waiting to be discovered.Writing a Lead Synonym Resume is the easiest part. Finding them takes time and commitment, but there is nothing wrong with spending a little time each day doing this.